Sam Rivera

Profile

Senior product designer with 9+ years owning end-to-end design for regulated, data-heavy products. I'm happiest in the messy middle — pairing with engineers and PMs to ship the smallest thing that works, then sharpening it with real usage data. I lead design systems, run lightweight research, and care a lot about accessibility and the quiet details most people never notice.

Experience

1. Senior Product Designer

   Northwind Health · San Francisco (hybrid)

   2022 — Present

   Design lead for the patient-facing app — scheduling, results, and care plans used by 1.2M people. First designer on the team; built the practice from a Figma file into a real design org.

   • Redesigned the appointment flow end-to-end, cutting drop-off by 34% and support tickets about booking by half.
   • Created Compass, the company's first design system (120+ components, full WCAG 2.2 AA audit), now used by four product teams.
   • Set up a 6-person research cadence — moderated sessions every sprint — that killed two features before they shipped and saved a quarter of build time.

2. Product Designer

   Ledgerline (fintech, Series B) · Remote

   2019 — 2022

   Owned the money-movement surface of a small-business banking app — transfers, approvals, and reconciliation — for 40k businesses.

   • Shipped a redesigned transfers flow with inline error recovery that lifted successful first-try payments to 96%.
   • Built the approval-rules builder from scratch, a top-three driver of upgrades to the paid tier that year.
   • Partnered with compliance to make disclosures legible — plain language, progressive disclosure — without slowing the flow.

3. Product Designer

   Mapcart · Oakland, CA

   2016 — 2019

   Generalist designer at an early-stage logistics startup — wore every hat from brand to dashboards to the driver mobile app.

   • Designed the dispatcher dashboard used daily by 300+ operators; grew from prototype to the product's core surface.
   • Ran the company's first usability tests and turned the findings into a recurring "ride-along" research practice.

Selected work

• Compass design system → Tokens, components, and the accessibility playbook behind it.
• Rebuilding patient scheduling → A case study on cutting drop-off by a third.
• Money movement, made calm → Error-recovery patterns for high-stakes payments.